The narrator opens Sir Orfeo with an extended dis-
cussion of the tale’s genre, describing the poem as a
Breton lai—one of a series of “aventours” that explore
marvelous subject matter (“ferli thing,” 1.4). The nar-
rator’s relatively detailed description provides a medi-
eval perspective on the Breton lai. They cover a rich
emotional range of subjects: narratives of war and sor-
row, joy and mirth, treachery and guile (ll. 5–7) as well
as ribald narratives (l. 9). These tales of “aventours that
fel bidayes” (adventures that happened in olden times,
ll. 8, 15) draw on an archaic or fi ctive cultural past that
often includes an encounter or exchange with a “fairy”
(l. 10) or the Otherworld. A lyrically compressed form
of romance, the Breton lai foregrounds love as its sub-
ject matter. The narrator’s closing emphasis in these
introductory lines on oral performance as an essential
characteristic of the Breton lai proves especially intrigu-
ing given the function of Orfeo’s harp within this poem
as the central symbol of resurrection and restoration of
community. The harp serves literally as the vehicle for
Orfeo’s restoration of Heurodis from the Celtic Other-
world to the world of the living and Orfeo’s subsequent
restoration, healed through the power of his own art,
to his rightful position as minstrel king.
The text of Sir Orfeo has been preserved in three
manuscripts, which range in date from the 14th to
15th centuries. Some evidence indicates that GEOFFREY
CHAUCER may have had access to one of these before
writing his own Breton lai, “The FRANKLIN’S TALE.”
While there are no known extant sources for Sir
Orfeo, some critics argue that the narrator of the poem
hints at an Old French/Breton Ur-text (source text that
no longer exists) for the lai in his opening discussion of
genre (ll. 13–20). Several Old French texts include ref-
erences to a musical lai of Orpheus. Late 13th and early
14th-century educated readers and listening audiences
for Sir Orfeo would have been familiar with the Orpheus
legend from a variety of classical and medieval sources.
The most readily available classical sources include
OVID’s Metamorphoses, book 10, and VIRGIL’s Georgics,
book 4, as well as related commentaries on these vol-
umes. Familiar medieval venues for material on Orpheus
include BOETHIUS’s The CONSOLATION OF PHILOSOPHY, the
Ovide Moralisé (late 13th–early 14th century), and Pierre
Bersuire’s Reductorium Morale (ca. 1325–37).
Established critical tradition for this poem draws its
energy from the competing infl uences that shape the
trifold face of the Otherworld: classical, Christian, and
Celtic. The crosscultural comparative dynamic of criti-
cism for this poem has always been especially rich,
particularly as a nuanced response to Christian allego-
rizations of Orpheus as Christ. Explorations of the
poem’s Celtic substrata have provided the foundation
for exploring intercultural infl uences between Celtic
folklore and its Christian sociopolitical counterparts.
Recent work on Christian music—especially the sig-
nifi cance of the lai’s central symbol, Orfeo’s harp—has
introduced intriguing discussions of this poem’s
manipulation of cultural boundaries between textual-
ity and orality and its claim for the restorative power of
narrative artistry in a chaotic world. Such readings
have opened up a vein of criticism that, beneath the
master narrative of the restoration of love and concom-
itant restoration of the bonds of human society, looks
at the poem’s refl ection of troubling uncertainties and
cultural fragmentation, its juxtaposition of the chaotic
and harmonic qualities of the Otherworld at best
uneasily reconciled.
See also ALLEGORY, MIDDLE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.
FURTHER READING
Bliss, A. J., ed. Sir Orfeo. 2nd ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1966.
Cartlidge, Neil. “Sir Orfeo in the Otherworld: Courting
Chaos?” Studies in the Age of Chaucer 26 (2004): 195–226.
Friedman, John Block. Orpheus in the Middle Ages. Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970.
Lerer, Seth. “Artifi ce and Artistry in Sir Orfeo.” Speculum 60,
no. 1 (1985): 92–109.
Regula Meyer Evitt“SIR WALTER RALEIGH TO HIS SON”
(“THREE THINGS THERE BE”) SIR WAL-
TER RALEIGH (ca. 1600) Although there is no cer-
tainty that SIR WALTER RALEIGH wrote this poem, it does
complement his prose “Instructions to his Son.” The
fi rst QUATRAIN of this clever ENGLISH SONNET poses the
riddle: What three things that fl ourish when they are
apart, hurt each other when they meet? The answer,
provided in line 5, is the wood, the weed, and the wag.
The second quatrain goes on to elaborate this connec-416 “SIR WALTER RALEIGH TO HIS SON”